During the dinner of the first night of the conference, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos got up to answer a question from John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Doerr asked Bezos what it takes to create an Internet treasure. Doerr rattled off a few answers as to what it took for Amazon to succeed.

At the end of the video, Bezos asked Doerr and Dean Kamen to announced two amendments to the Constitution he'd like to make. They didn't answer publicly, but later, holding court with Dean Kamen, John Doerr, and a few other Techonomists, Bezos said that if he had the power, the amendment he'd like to make is the following:

Every year, 10 percent of the Senate would have to leave the Senate and they could never run for office again.

Deborah Hopkins (Chairman, Venture Capital Initiatives and Chief Innovation Officer Citi)Future is about partnership and collaborationBring capabilities to customers, clients and cities. Cities is a future focal point beyond countries.

Eric Schmidt of Google: Assumes that people are not ready for the technology that is coming. Every two day we create as much information as was created by all of humanity up to 2003. Smartphone location devices can say where you are and you can tell your friends. With AI can predict where you will go with high accuracy. With 14 photos we can with high accuracy determine who you are. These technologies and other raise fundamental societal issues

Both Kevin Kelly and Eric Schmidt highlighted the importance of transparency and accountability to reduce the negatives and dangers of technology. I agree and the work of David Brin on transparency and accountability should be reviewed for a deeper understanding on the details of the processes of transparency and accountability.

Technology safety needs to look at larger analysis physical analysis of dangers. This is discussed on an ongoing basis at the lifeboat foundation and on my site in detail. I will provide some links and summary in a follow up article.

Q - What does a Biologist know about being an engineer ?A - I [Stewart Brand] have the genes of an engineer. My father and brother were engineers and I was bit by the hacker bug early.Q- Reinventing InfrastructureBridge is infrastructure, river is also infrastructure.Radio spectrum is infrastructure but so is the environmentWe are terraforming the planet but doing it badly, we should do terraforming wellTweet your questions to:@TCMYQAwhole Earth Catalog was libertarian. Ask not what your country can do for you, do it for yourself. Now we must act on a global scale.

Getting rid of coal - Fiat [government] driven or innovation driventPreviously thought population control had to be fiat driven, only China really did it. Turned out that wealth and social trends caused population growth reduction.fiat- good government policy can accelerate a solutionBe pragmatic - be an engineer and solve the damn problemsEnvironmental movement has legacy resistance to nuclear energy and genetically modified food. But no resistance to synthetic biology which is way more radical then GM food.

At the Techonomy conference, David Christian of Macquarie University gave a presentation entitled, "Reinventing Intelligence: Why collective learning makes humans so different."

Christian began his talk by explaining that there's a very long history of scientists trying to answer the question, "What makes humans different?" The answers have resulted in a series of failed attempts to define humanity.

For example, it's been said that humans are different because we:

Use tools - But we know that monkeys, gorillas, and crows use tools as well.

Lead an interior emotional life - But we can see love between animals, such as mothers and their children.

Use language - But Coco the gorilla can speak.

The reason the answer to this question has failed multiple times is
because we haven't been able to see the history of humanity as a whole. To understand humanity you need to understand the entire history of humanity from the creation of the universe to today.

At the official opening plenary session of Techonomy, Kevin Kelly--a co-founder
of Wired, and author of the
forthcoming book What Technology Wants--made what I considered a pretty profound remark.“The first animal we domesticated was humans,”
Kelly said. He went on to describe how we “physically changed ourselves through
agriculture, through cooking…we’re both masters of technology and also the
children of technology.”

In Wrangham’s account, our ancestors discovered fire and
cooking at some hard-to-fix point in the past—but farther back than most scientists had previously assumed. At this point, the power of this innovation then dramatically
drove human evolution.

A country's decision making process for information and communication
technologies (ICT) has gone through two very distinct stages. Prior to
the collection of worldwide data by country, decisions were first made
based on anecdotal information.

The second stage, where we currently stand today is utilizing a
combination of hard data and somewhat anecdotal information culled
together to form a Networked Readiness Index or NRI. This index is seen
as a collection of best practices for ICT readiness and competitiveness
and it's gathered and summarized by the World Economic Forum in its
"Global Information Technology Report."

The purpose of the NRI is to determine how a country's information
and communication technologies (ICT) are being used currently and how
capable it is of continued growth. The hope is that countries can use
this data to make decisions about ICT. For example, one data point
demonstrates the top and worst performers by income group. Looking at
similar countries, can analysts determine what countries are doing right
and wrong with regard to ICT.

The data the World Economic Forum uses to calculate its Networked
Readiness Index (NRI) is comprised of 60 different variables of which 40
percent are hard data and the remaining 60 percent are based on survey
data. That survey data is collected from a few thousand CEOs or
managers of organizations.

But I do have a remark on how sophisticated conversations like this one often get mashed into meaningless by media coverage--which is why we need ideas-oriented conferences like Techonomy in the first place.

This is my first post on the Techonomy blog, so I mainly want
to introduce myself. I’m Chris Mooney, a blogger for Discover and author of several books about the relationship between science and politics, and how
things sometimes go dramatically splat in this area.

So I may seem, in some ways, an odd duck at Techonomy—except
for the following fact.

As someone who’s extensively covered climate change, evolution, and
stem cell battles (among others), I’ve learned there’s a fundamental dynamic here.
Something in science or in technology comes along and dramatically changes our lives—and then people
resist it. They fight back against the future, or change, or just plain reality.